Jay Currie

“Anyone who saw those pictures of the results of the terrible bombing of Qana couldn’t, I think, come to any other conclusion than that some elements of the Israeli response were disproportionate.”
david cameron, leader of the conservative party in england, the scotsman

While I’ve no doubt that Cameron is playing to the polling, the fact is that he is citing pictures which were almost certainly staged. Which indicates the potency of images and their capacity to be taken at face value even where there is considerable doubt as to their veracity. Here is a leading politician basing a claim as to disproportionality on evidence which is, as the pomo folks would say, contested.

Green Helmet, the Hezbollah dead baby wrangler, and his accomplices in the Qana press pen have reached out and shifted a Conservative Party leader’s position. Not a bad day’s work. And, unless people like Richard North at Eureferendum and Charles Johnston at Little Green Footballs are checking, the MSM seems incapable of actually fact checking the often incendiary images coming out of the warzone.

As more and more of the pictures from Lebanon are looked at the pattern of photoshopping and Hezbollah photo-ops is simply being confirmed. It should not be up to unpaid amateur bloggers to be doing this. Rather, supposedly professional news organizations should be casting a beady eye over any material which comes from the warzone and placing appropriate disclaimers. Outright fraud should never make the wires, staged events should be described as such, conducted tours and minders should be identified: if the parties won’t play ball then the Reuters and APs of the world should leave.

In an information war the news agencies hold all the cards: they should play one once in a while lest political leaders be required to make policy in reaction to faked and staged pictures.